As companies offer lavish leave options, would-be opt-out moms are being lured back to work. With up to five years of time off, is it any wonder these employers are winning our loyalty?

Early one evening in March, Amal Shehata was giving her infant son a bath and noticed he was getting too big for his baby tub. Overwhelmed with emotion that she was missing her son grow up while she worked, Amal decided to quit a job she loved as a director for internal strategic projects at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she'd worked for 11 years. She wanted to be a full-time mom. After discussing the idea with her husband, Amal walked into her boss's office to resign. Her boss, however, had another idea. Since he didn't want to lose a valuable employee, he asked Amal to consider a six-month leave of absence instead. "My boss told me, 'You don't have to take this traditional approach and just leave,' " she says.

Amal's time off ends this month. If she decides she wants to extend her leave, the company will give her another four and a half years to return. That's because this July, PricewaterhouseCoopers launched Full Circle, one of the most aggressive career options in the country designed to retain and attract working moms. "We know women are exiting the workforce to care for kids or elders," says Jennifer Allyn, managing director of gender retention and advancement at PwC. "We wanted to increase the likelihood that when they're ready to come back, they'll look to us."

Fueled by prospects of a labor shortage and a shifting workforce, extended leave options are part of a larger push to reconnect with women who've left the workforce and also keep those who might exit to care for a child or an aging parent or return to school. At the same time, companies are realizing that women can step to the sidelines several times in their work lives and still have successful, meaningful careers. "The corporate marketplace is beginning to understand and realize the value of supporting a woman's full work-life cycle," says Karen Sheehan, managing director of W2W Ventures, an Arlington, VA-based firm that advises companies on how to help their employees strategically exit and reenter the workforce. "Working mothers are a tremendous resource and have never been as needed in the professional marketplace as they are now."

BETTER WORK PERKS
This welcome appreciation for top female talent is driven largely by demographics and business strategy. The labor force is expected to grow by only 1 percent annually over the next eight years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—"a slower rate of growth than in the past two decades. As a result, the workforce participation rate will likely decrease. As the massive baby-boom generation heads into retirement, some economic analysts question whether there will be enough people to fill vacant jobs.